Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Book on Android testing

Oh, those were the days, when Android was pre-1.0! Documentation and training material was scarce, platform sources were not yet released, no device in sight. It was then when Diego Torres Milano first published a post about unit testing on Android. 3 short years later Android is the dominant smartphone platform but there has been no book dedicated to Android testing. Who else could have written that book than Diego?

Let's start with a disclaimer: I was a reviewer of this book. I almost met Diego once when we both presented at Droidcon London 2009 but I had to leave early and we didn't. Believe or not, at the end of 2009 Android enthusiasts could still fit into a medium-sized presentation hall.

The book starts with a general introduction on testing then it starts to focus on Android testing. Android has JUnit integrated but the Android-specific classes are not over-documented. The Android test case classes are explained one by one with examples then we learn, how the principles of Test Driven Development can be applied to our Android projects. The second half of the book deals with useful techniques like automatic test execution, ways of performance and coverage testing and different tools for Behaviour Driven Development and Continuous Integration.

All in all, there is plenty of information in this book that is difficult to find or figure out. I can warmly recommend this book to everyone who builds production-quality software for the Android platform.

About the blog

This blog is a personal diary about my adventures with the Google Android platform. I write it in the hope that others may find my experiences useful but please, beware. The blog is created as I gain experience about the platform myself so errors, omissions, etc. may be found in the entries.